As progress towards globalisation continues, organisations seek ever better ways with which to configure
and reconfigure their global production networks so as to better understand and be able to deal with risk. Such networks
are complex arrangements of different organisations from potentially diverse and divergent domains and geographical
locations. Moreover, greater focus is being put upon global production network systems and how these can
be better coordinated, controlled and assessed for risk, so that they are flexible and competitive advantage can be
gained from them within the market place. This paper puts forward a reference ontology to support risk assessment
for product-service systems applied to the domain of global production networks. The aim behind this is to help accelerate
the development of information systems by way of developing a common foundation to improve interoperability
and the seamless exchange of information between systems and organisations. A formal common logic based
approach has been used to develop the reference ontology, utilising end user information and knowledge from three
separate industrial domains. Results are presented which illustrate the ability of the approach, together with areas for
further work.

Description:

This is an Open Access Article. It is published by Springer under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 Unported Licence (CC BY). Full details of this licence are available at: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Sponsor:

The research leading to these results has received funding from the European Commission’s 7th Framework Programme
under grant agreement no NMP2-SL-2013-608627.